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Art is True North

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Hubs & Huddles column of Cannopy Magazine, which focuses on multi-purpose performance centres
Ensemble column, which highlights classical artists and ensen, which highlights classical artists and ensembles
Ellington column, which features jazz vocalists and instrumentalists
Studio Sessions column, which focuses on in-depth artist profiles — particularly visual artists in their creative spaces
Materials column, which focuses on artists working across various creative media; Profiling Various Creative Media
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Fourth Wall column, which focuses on the global theatre industry
 In Motion column, which focuses on the global dance industry
In Focus column, which highlights the global film industry
Alt.itude column, which focuses on global alternative music
Homegrown column, which highlights Canadian alternative music
Arts & Letters column, which focuses on essays, opinions, and ideas related to the arts

Tekahionwake

Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake

The double life of Emily Pauline Johnson’s Poetry

WORDS BY ROWAN SKY | ARTS & LETTERS

FEB 28, 2023 | ISSUE 11

A printed poem is experienced visually─text displays the whole poem at once, and readers contemplate rhythm, emphasis, and pacing for themselves. Readers also rely on editors and critics for expert opinions on interpretation. Yet performance is a differently constrained spatial and temporal experience for the audience: their own prior knowledge and experience influences how they perceive what they see and hear moment by moment. The performer controls the time and space that the poem fills using her body and uses pauses, breaths, movement, gesture, emphasis, volume, rhythm, and pacing to embody the poem and provoke meanings that cannot be expressed in the usual textual conventions of printed poetry.

One performer who notably put poetry into action was E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake (1861-1913), an Indigenous artist from Six Nations who used her work to renegotiate negative images of Indigenous people in Canadian culture. She began publishing poetry in the 1880s and toured Canada, the U.S, and Britain to perform in music halls from 1892 to...

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